Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
At 11:15 Thursday morning, he put down a book to play tennis with his wife, but after twenty minutes it began to rain and they returned to the rambling, brown-shingled house overlooking Monument Beach. At 11:45, the phone rang in the upstairs bedroom. It was Ted Kennedy calling from Hyannis Port, just fifteen miles to the east.
“Hi, how are you?” said the Mayor. “Why don’t we form a third party. I’ll be your campaign manager.”
Just alerted by a phone call from a McGovern staffer, Kennedy told White that he was on the “short list” for Vice-President. White didn’t take the call very seriously, but soon thereafter the pace quickened. Pierre Salinger reached Ira Jackson, an assistant to the Mayor, at his parents’ home, where he was recuperating from an operation. McGovern needed a full biography of White, copies of his most important speeches, eight-by-ten glossies of the Mayor and his family right away. An incredulous Jackson, groggy with Valium, raced to City Hall, running every red light he encountered (“I figured I had a papal dispensation”). In the Mayor’s office, he found aides Bob Kiley and Frank Tivnan besieged by calls from across the country. Soon John Chancellor of NBC and an assistant to Walter Cronkite at CBS were on the line, inquiring about rumors sweeping Miami Beach that White was about to become McGovern’s running mate.
Finally, at 1:40 p.m., the phone rings in Bourne, and White, still in tennis shorts and a blue cable-knit sweater, answers.
“Hi, Kevin, this is George McGovern.”
“Hi, George! You did a superb job. I watched you last night.”
McGovern asks White if he would like to run with him. The Mayor would be delighted. For a few moments they discuss the “issues”—McGovern’s preoccupation with the Vietnam War, White’s focus on the urban crisis—and find they are not far apart.
“I’d like to have you with me,” McGovern says. He wants to make a couple of “routine” phone checks and promises to call back in a few minutes to complete the deal.
When White hangs up and tells his wife, she puts her hand to her mouth and murmurs, “Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord.”
Things are moving very fast now. Mankiewicz and Salinger are on the phone to Bourne and to Boston, seeking more information. Kiley and Tivnan rifle the files for the requested materials. With dozens of newsmen descending on City Hall, Tivnan orders the Mayor’s office sealed. Ira Jackson, bearing a bulging portfolio, races to Bourne, a sixty-mile trip he makes in barely forty-five minutes.
In Miami Beach, Salinger asks aide Milton Gwirtzman to draft nominating and seconding speeches for White. Gwirtzman calls a disbelieving Barney Frank in Boston to get background on the Mayor, then raps out several
speeches, which he rushes to McGovern’s suite. Gary Hart leaves the suite, goes to the “situation room,” and asks Rick Stearns how long it will take to prepare nominating petitions (the new McGovern-inspired rules require signatures from 200 delegates to be submitted to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Fontainebleau Hotel by 4:00 p.m.). Stearns says the petitions have already been circulated in blank; all he has to do is to insert the candidate’s name. Hart tells him to insert the name of Kevin White.
The Mayor calls his old friends Harvard professor Sam Huntington and his wife, Nancy, who are vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. Reaching Nancy as she mops her kitchen floor, White whispers, “McGovern wants me on the ticket. Get ready for a flight to Miami.”
But the Mayor doesn’t know how he’s going to get himself and his entourage to Miami in time to accept the nomination that evening. Then comes another phone call from Ted Kennedy, offering to solve the problem. George Steinbrenner is flying in from Cleveland to pick Kennedy up in Hyannis and take him to Miami. Why doesn’t the Mayor hitch a ride. White agrees. There is even talk of a helicopter to ferry the Mayor’s party from Bourne to Hyannis, an intimation of executive privilege which flutters more than a few breasts.
Shortly after 2:00 p.m., Secret Service agents in McGovern’s party pass the word: protection should now be extended to White.
In McGovern’s suite, Frank Mankiewicz turns to George McGovern and asks whether he has checked with Ted Kennedy. McGovern says that, as a courtesy, he has asked someone to inform Kennedy that White is high on the list, but Kennedy’s response was inconclusive. “I think you ought to speak to him yourself,” Mankiewicz advises. After all, Teddy may not welcome another Irish Catholic from his home state gaining a position that could make him the heir presumptive to the presidency.
McGovern goes into his bedroom to place the call. A few minutes later he emerges.
“What’d he say?” Mankiewicz asks.
“He said, ‘Okay.’ ”
“No, George,” he persists. “What’d he
say
?”
“He said, ‘Okay, if that’s the way you want it.’ ”
Silence.
“That means ‘no,’ George.”
McGovern calls Kennedy back. This time Ted is more explicit. He can’t campaign for the ticket with any enthusiasm if White is on it. He suggests Wilbur Mills, Abe Ribicoff, or Tom Eagleton. So strongly does he feel about White that he might reconsider his own refusal. McGovern picks up on that. If Kennedy will reconsider, the spot is his. Ted says he’ll think about it and call back in half an hour.
While McGovern waits for Kennedy’s final answer, a call comes in from John Kenneth Galbraith, a Kennedy ally and delegate-at-large from Massachusetts. Galbraith tells McGovern that the Massachusetts delegation is “up in arms” at White’s selection. White had fought the McGovern forces tooth and
nail in the spring primary, and many members of the delegation, including Chairman Robert Drinan, have no use for the Mayor. If McGovern persists in his selection, 70 percent of the 102-member delegation will walk off the floor.
McGovern remembers Senator Kenneth Keating of New York stalking out of the 1964 Republican convention to protest Barry Goldwater’s nomination. He shudders at Galbraith’s prediction, but it is Ted Kennedy’s opposition that really worries him. How can he campaign for President without Kennedy’s enthusiastic support?
At 3:00 p.m., Frank Wilson, Kevin White’s driver, arrives at the Bourne house with three films for the Mayor’s weekend viewing:
The Yearling, Beckett
, and
The Man with No Name
.
“Don’t leave, Frank,” says White. “I may have to go to Hyannis. I may need a plane.”
At 3:15, Ted Kennedy calls McGovern back. He won’t run himself, but he still opposes White and urges consideration of the other names.
McGovern assures him White will be dropped.
He calls Abe Ribicoff, who is disinclined to run. The candidate then tracks down his closest friend in the Senate, Gaylord Nelson, who also begs off.
It is 3:45, fifteen minutes before the deadline. “I think I’ll go with Tom,” he says.
After McGovern has talked to the enthusiastic Eagleton, Mankiewicz takes the phone. “Now, Tom,” he says, “is there anything in your background that we ought to know—any problems, you know, like dames, or a loan that went bad …”
At 4:05 p.m., McGovern finally calls White back. “Kevin,” he says, “I have to apologize to you. I couldn’t put it together. For reasons that I can’t explain to you—and may never be able to explain to you—I’ve just offered the vice-presidency to Tom Eagleton.”
The Mayor watches on television as McGovern delivers a rousing acceptance speech (“Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream!”) and accepts the convention’s tribute with a glowing Tom Eagleton at his side.
Kathryn White weeps that evening. His arm around her shoulders, Kevin stares moodily at the surf rolling off the black water of Buzzards Bay.
If ever a man was bred for politics it was Kevin White, the product of a remarkable union in which two diverse strains of Boston history were uneasily woven.
His mother’s people were Hagans, emigrants from Ireland to Nova Scotia during the Great Famine. By the time they reached Massachusetts several decades later, they had taken on the protective coloration of the Maritime Provinces, a sober rectitude which gained them quick acceptance among Boston’s Yankees. Opening a fashionable shoe store downtown, Henry Hagan joined the Citizens’ Municipal League, became president of the Chamber of Commerce, and eventually won election to the City Council as a candidate of the Good Government Association, that band of municipal reformers known colloquially
as the “Goo-Goos.” Serving on the Council for eight years, one term as President, Hagan was a bitter critic of James Michael Curley, and Curley’s forces lashed back, labeling him “a haughty turncoat, in whose veins ice water substitutes for the warm blood of his ancestral land.”
In 1928, Hagan’s daughter Patricia married a different kind of Boston politician. The gregarious son of a Galway-born brewer, star quarterback at Boston College and later for the semipro Providence Steamrollers, Joe White took to politics with particular gusto. He held virtually every office accessible to a Boston politician: four terms in the State House of Representatives, four in the State Senate, fourteen years on the Boston School Committee (four as chairman), ten years on the City Council (two as President). In 1945 he announced for mayor, but Governor Maurice Tobin preferred his old friend Fire Commissioner Bill Reilly and urged White to drop out. Wary of bucking the Governor, he retired from the field, for Joe White was nothing if not prudent. All through his decades in politics he kept a cushy state job as director of the Telephone and Telegraph Division in the Department of Public Utilities. In addition, he was said to have an interest in an oil distributorship run by his brother-in-law, State Senator Jim Scanlon. So many irons did White have in the public smithy that when he ran for lieutenant governor his opponents hired a sound truck to tour the city’s streets with a little parody called “Joe White and His Seven Jobs.”
But White wasn’t simply a reincarnation of James Michael Curley. Like many Irish-Americans of his era, he was intensely proud of his hard-won respectability. His electoral strength was concentrated in the “upper wards,” the southern reaches of the city now largely inhabited by second- and third-generation Irish families advancing rapidly into the middle class (while Curley always drew best among the working-class denizens of the “lower wards”). His name, not readily identifiable as Irish, helped attract voters in the Yankee and Jewish districts. So secure was his reputation as a “high type” Boston politician that when the New Boston Committee assembled its “reform slate” in 1951, White was the only incumbent councilman included. Declining to feed off ethnic rivalries, he served for a time as regional chairman of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. An accomplished storyteller and witty performer—reminding his sons of Maurice Chevalier—he never stooped to Curley’s demagoguery.
But the White household suffered strains. Joe thrived on his eternal round of banquets, rallies, torchlight parades, and Irish wakes; a congenital handshaker and backslapper, it took him half an hour to walk the quarter mile from the State House to City Hall. Patricia loathed that kind of politicking; there was something demeaning about it. When Joe went off to one of his dreary testimonials at the Parker House, she preferred staying home in West Roxbury reading Tolstoy or Willa Cather. A former public school teacher, she read deeply in the European Catholic intellectuals like Newman, Chesterton, and Teilhard de Chardin, and subscribed to the liberal Catholic journal
Commonweal
. Though deeply religious, she was plainly outside the American Catholic
mainstream as represented by Richard Cardinal Cushing and Senator Joe McCarthy. A Stevensonian liberal, she staked out advanced positions on political and social issues. Determined that her children bear the stamp of culture, she insisted that, even though none of them had any real feeling for music, they all gather around the radio on Saturday afternoons to listen to the Metropolitan Opera.
It was Patricia who chose her sons’ rather literary Christian names—Kevin, Terrence, and Brendan—unusual for a time when most Irish-American boys were called Patrick, James, or Francis. Joe White didn’t much care for any of them, but he was particularly distressed by his eldest son’s. “Jesus,” he’d grouse, “how do you expect a kid named Kevin to get on the ballot?” Joe’s State House friends would smirk as they asked, “How’s Kelvinator?” Indeed, Kevin wasn’t his father’s favorite child—a distinction reserved for the second son, Terrence. From childhood, Terry had identified with Joe, soaking up his clubhouse lore and tactical cunning, while Kevin gravitated toward his mother. For years Patricia took her son’s part in his endless running battles with Joe.
Young Kevin was a chronic hell-raiser, a natural leader always chosen to captain the neighborhood boys in their sporting contests, as well as in less wholesome pursuits. More than once the future mayor barely escaped the long arm of the law, though not that of his father. Unbeknownst to most of his constituents, Joe White was a heavy drinker. In deference to his teetotal wife, he did his boozing outside the house, but when he came home drunk, he often took a belt or razor strap to his recalcitrant son. Relations between father and son got so bad that even when Joe hadn’t been drinking he’d haul off and knock Kevin down.
At Cranwell, a Jesuit preparatory school in western Massachusetts, Kevin disrupted classes so repeatedly he was asked to leave. Moving on to Tabor Academy, he compiled another dismal record. In part because of reading problems stemming from a dyslexic condition, he graduated eighty-third in a class of eighty-five. Only the intervention of Headmaster James Wickenden persuaded Williams College to admit him as one of its “ten-percenters”—students with low grades but other indicators of potential. Nor did he distinguish himself at Williams, where he played a little football and served as vice-president of the Newman Club.
Despite bad relations between father and son, Joe White was a potent influence. Nobody was surprised when Kevin majored in political science, then went on to Boston College Law School, the traditional breeding ground of Irish politicians. In 1956, he reinforced those credentials by marrying into another famous political family, the Galvins of Charlestown. “Mother” Galvin’s seven daughters were the pride of the Town, one prettier than the next, each educated at the best Catholic institutions, polished with elocution and ballet lessons. None was a more perfect lady than slim, ash-blond Kathryn, who graduated from Newton College of the Sacred Heart in 1956, just as Kevin signed on as assistant to Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett
Byrne. Kathryn and Kevin were married that June, moving into a cramped apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street. For the next four years, Kevin divided his time between the DA’s office—where he specialized in the criminal side of paternity suits—and a private law practice with another assistant DA, Larry Cameron.